Circuit Stickers’ creators want us to build stories using electronics

The duo is making tech accessible for everyone through art.

Chibitronics, the team behind Circuit Stickers, wants us to tell stories using electronics.

"I hope that after making something with circuit stickers, people will feel like circuits can be just another art and craft material, like paint and canvas. Except now, in addition to colors, we can tell our stories with light, sensing, and interactions," Jie Qi, a doctoral student in electronics and programming at MIT Media Lab and one half of Chibitronics, tells Wired.co.uk.

Qi has been building artworks using hardware for years through her research group High-Low Tech. Circuit Stickers is an extension of this. Made with electrical engineer Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Circuit Stickers—essentially anisotropic conductive adhesive (Z-tape) added to flexible circuit boards—can connect "virtually any conductive material" by being soldered, sewn with conductive thread, or even connected with conductive inks and paints, like those Bare Conductive sells. They believe the ease with which anyone can build a circuit using their $25 starter pack means people do not have to be tied to the technology, but liberated by it in their designs.

"The magic comes in when we can take advantage of all the creative qualities of craft, when we start building hardware and electronics with craft materials," says Qi. "We're able to give what we build a story—it's the difference between having a glowing red LED light, and using that light to make a blushing robot. I think there's something very valuable and engaging in creating those connections."

So far, the public seems to agree. Qi began using the stickers as part of her teaching method in workshops and seminars with totally disparate groups, including secondary school students in the Girl Scouts, Tinkering Studio staff at the Exploratorium, English students, and engineers and entrepreneurs at FOO Camp, an annual hacker event. "Everyone has successfully made circuits, and approached their creations in their own style—from creating a glowing paper airplane during a trans-Atlantic flight, to illuminating a poem, to creating a light-up 3D-printed coaster," says Qi. "It was really exciting to see these people approach circuits not as just 'lighting something up' but telling a story and giving a point to why their project is glowing."

Jie Qi

Jie Qi

Jie Qi

Jie Qi

Jie Qi

Jie Qi

Circuit Stickers is so popular in fact, it's smashed its Crowd Supply crowdfunding target by 4,811,700 percent. Ok—admittedly, it began with a rather paltry $1 target, the reason being, according to Huang, "everyone already loved the product." The money raised is made up of sales. The Crowd Supply platform enables preorders and once a campaign is funded it turns into an online store and handles the product shipping. Already, hundreds of orders have been placed, hence the target smashing prestige, and Huang says the money from the campaign means they are on track to cover all development expenses incurred thus far.

"Since our primary goal is to facilitate the scale distribution of an existing design (as opposed to raising money to start a company or to develop new designs), we picked a goal of $1 as our funding target," explains Huang. "We feel this is an honest reflection of our intentions."

The reason any of this is possible at all, is down to Shanzhai guerilla-style manufacturing techniques explored and developed by Huang. He had been researching flexible circuits "for a more conventional purpose," visiting factories that manufactured Flex PCBs along the way. Then came a "moment of serendipity"—he was giving a group of MIT Media Lab students a tour of Shenzhen and Qi was one of those students. She told him about her electronics/papercraft projects, and they realized how sticky, flexible circuits could take this even further. Qi had already worked on littlebits, popular snap-together circuits.

"We practice 'lean design' out of necessity, as one of our explicit goals is to stay focused on design and innovation, without getting distracted by fundraising or the day-to-day issues of operating a large company. I've spent the past couple of years studying the lean design techniques of the Shanzhai—China's experts at 'guerrilla manufacturing'—so part of this project is applying what I've learned there, and seeing how it pans out.

"The idea of using Z-tape to stick electronics together has been around for a long time; 3M has been marketing the adhesive for use in consumer products for years. It all boils down to a matter of the toolkits and primitives provided. The initial set of sticker designs [in our kits] are simple, but that's a reflection of our conservative approach to design and manufacturing, and not a fundamental limitation of the platform—we picked targets we can for sure deliver to customers on-time. In the future, there will probably be stickers of increasing complexity; it's not unreasonable to expect stickable wireless radios or even stickable Linux computers down the road. One important angle is to think of the stickers as intuitive, 'designed' primitives as opposed to a collection of raw components looking to replace breadboards and PCBs."

To start, the pair had wanted to include transistors, resistors, and capacitors in the starter kit, but it decided this would detract from the overall goal: "to liberate electronics hardware from being mired in annoying details." Instead, they offer pre-prepared electronics with their own "behaviors"—heartbeats, twinkle, fade, and blink effects for the LEDs, for instance. Depending on the kit you buy, you'll get a variety of colored and white LED stickers, copper tape, batteries, conductive plastic, Z-tape, and series of sensor stickers (light, microphone, touch) as well as a timer circuit sticker and microcontroller sticker. A Circuit Sticker Sketechbook has all the instructions and is described as being like a coloring book—except you fill it in with
circuits.

"I'm looking forward to seeing how people use these behaviors, and finding ways to refine the concept of designed, curated primitives even further," said Huang.

The pair has been very public about the fact that the product is very much in its research stages—it works great, but as an academic exploit they do plan on making tweaks as they go along, after seeing how the public use the Circuit Stickers.

Qi thinks the growing popularity for products like theirs is a result of the democratization of new digital fabrication techniques like lasercutting and 3D printing "getting people's imaginations excited about the possibilities of making and manipulating atoms as well as bits."

"Perhaps, at a higher level, people are trying balance out the massive and anonymous information intake of our digital selves by engaging in more personal and creative activity through our physical selves," she muses. "That is, to go from digital consumers to physical creators."

The medium, she says, is "friendly and familiar", hopefully making the idea of circuit-building unintimidating to the uninitiated. It's also most definitely for all age groups, easy enough for kids to use, but with an added programmable microcontroller people can also build in their own functionality. For anyone learning, each sticker is designed specifically to represent its function—LEDs are shaped like triangles, akin to the diode symbol, for instance.

Jie Qi

Because of the diversity the stickers offer for people of all skill levels, Qi is hoping people will pick them up and begin to play with them in totally diverse ways, using their own background to toy with different outcomes.

"Expert painters may paint their circuits with conductive paint, expert model builders stick circuits into their models, expert drawers can draw their circuits with a conductive pen, and they're even solderable so you can use them like traditional electronics and with traditional components too."

Qi has already joined with experimental art group NEXMAP to demonstrate the stickers' uses, first off by hacking the humble notebook and bringing it to life in workshops. She's also working on more interactive paintings using the stickers, building on the dandelion artwork she revealed in 2012 where the seeds in the painting can be blown away by a viewer to make new flowers. "I'm also working on a rechargeable sketchbook that allows people to power their circuits through the book," Qi tells us, "and an interactive storybook."

Qi wants the public to be able to do the same—to use circuits for things they had never thought possible and expand their view of what electronics can be.

"I hope more people are inspired to learn the theory behind circuits, electronics, and programming so that they can control the electricity like they can a paintbrush. Ultimately, I hope it opens up everyone's minds about what they are capable of creating with circuits and to look at electronics beyond just tools (or just something useful to learn in school) but as ways to express their imaginations in magical ways."